[Correspondence] Neonatal vitamin A: time to move on?

July 18, 2015

The Lancet 386, 9989 (2015)

Author: Christine Stabell Benn, Peter Aaby, Ane Bærent Fisker

When well intended trials of neonatal vitamin A supplementation (NVAS) fail to reduce mortality it is time to move on.1 But the direction depends on what we learned. According to current interpretation, NVAS works by preventing vitamin A deficiency, and many will reason that the trial populations were not sufficiently deficient, and NVAS might still have a role in deficient subgroups.1 However, there are alternative interpretations.